Meyerbeer's L'Africaine

Meyerbeer's L'Africaine
Author: Robert Ignatius Letellier
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2022-03-04
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1527581039

Vasco de Gama was the last collaboration between Giacomo Meyerbeer and Eugène Scribe, the famous playwright and librettist. The work had intermittently preoccupied them both since 1838, and it had become legendary as L’Africaine years before its completion. The first version of the opera became known as the Vecchia Africana of the long years of Meyerbeer’s anxious labours on this most troublesome of his operas An adoring public gave Meyerbeer a tumultuous posthumous accolade on the première of L'Africaine on 28 April 1865, a year after his death. This opera which involved Meyerbeer and Scribe’s creative energies for so long includes in one last and splendid achievement many of the elements that had hitherto featured in varying degrees in all their other joint creations. Both composer and librettist were men of immense imagination and genius. Between them, they created four works of great power and beauty that radically affected the history of opera. This study examines the origins and creation of the opera, its dramaturgy and musical style, the history of its astonishing reception around the world until the 1930s, its revival in more recent times. One of the special features of the book is the collection of iconography associated with the work, and its interpretation by many of the greatest singers of the Golden Age of opera. This imagery and many musical examples help to bring out the themes explored in this work more fully.

Meyerbeer's L'Africaine

Meyerbeer's L'Africaine
Author: Burton D. Fisher
Publisher: Opera Journeys Publishing
Total Pages: 32
Release: 2005-11-01
Genre:
ISBN: 1102009148

Burton D. Fisher's extremely popular Mini Guides feature Principal Characters in the Opera, Brief Story Synopsis, Story Narrative with Music Highlight Examples, and an insightful and in depth Commentary and Analysis of the opera.

The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera

The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera
Author: David Charlton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 524
Release: 2003-09-04
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1139825895

This 2003 Companion is a fascinating and accessible exploration of the world of grand opera. Through this volume a team of scholars and writers on opera examine those important Romantic operas which embraced the Shakespearean sweep of tragedy, history, love in time of conflict, and the struggle for national self-determination. Rival nations, rival religions and violent resolutions are common elements, with various social or political groups represented in the form of operatic choruses. The book traces the origins and development of a style created during an increasingly technical age, which exploited the world-renowned skills of Parisian stage-designers, artists, and dancers as well as singers. It analyses in detail the grand operas by Rossini, Auber, Meyerbeer and Halévy, discusses grand opera in Russia and Germany, and also in the Czech lands, Italy, Britain and the Americas. The volume also includes an essay by the renowned opera director David Pountney.

Giacomo Meyerbeer

Giacomo Meyerbeer
Author: Marco Clemente Pellegrini
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 610
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 144380083X

This Guide has resulted from years of research on the papers and music of Giacomo Meyerbeer, and aims to provide a bibliographical aid and point of reference for further research. The first part presents the private papers connected to the composer and his principal librettist, Eugène Scribe—both archival and printed, with working papers and correspondence, as found in Berlin, Paris and some of the famous libraries of the world. The body of Part 2 draws together all the known resources on Meyerbeer's life and historical reputation—from full scale biographies and entries in reference books, through critical discussions to website resources to records of symposia. The third part provides material about his background with its unique mixture of Jewish and Prussian elements, the powerful role of the city of Berlin in his life and work. The fourth part lists bibliographic material for Meyerbeer's music, looking at his operas, grouped as German, Italian and French, with each individual entry providing a record of the scores available, both modern and historical, the various arrangements made from the operas during the heyday of their popularity, reviews of modern performances, discography, and bibliography of studies and publications pertinent to the wider cultural and historical contexts of the works. The next two sections constitute an extended record of material pertinent to the contemporaries of Meyerbeer. In the fifth section are select bibliographies of composers, authors, artists, performers, politicians, those who played some part in the composer's life, or anyone of significance in his wider contemporary circumstances. This is continued in the sixth part where the cultural and aesthetic elements of the composer's milieu, or life in the theatre during seventy years of the nineteenth century, are listed. The seventh part adds a bibliography of social and historical background, where the incidental issues of Judaism in nineteenth-century Europe, and the wider political, historical and geographical circumstances of Meyerbeer's life, his relentless travelling, and closely recorded experiences in Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, England, and Austria. The eighth section provides a thematic key to this extensive material. Part 9 provides an extended tripartite series of lists of the published scores, arrangements and some special studies of Meyerbeer over the period 1820 to 2005—in alphabetical, chronological and thematic ordering. The last two sections furnish the modern equivalent of this record of Meyerbeer and his compositions, showing in Part 11 the list of performances of his operas since the Second World War, and in Part 12, listing the recordings of the operas, both commercial and private, for the same period. The thirteenth and last section is iconographical, pictures that represent an interesting survey of the popular response to Meyerbeer in the 19th century.

Giacomo Meyerbeer

Giacomo Meyerbeer
Author: Robert Ignatius Letellier
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 610
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1443800996

Giacomo Meyerbeer remains an enigma. Until the First World War he was one of the most famous of all composers. this Reader hopes to reflect something of the immense fame, prestige and love in which this composer was once held, the voices of doubt and dismissal that began to be heard even in his lifetime, and the enduring witness to his fame and worth evinced by those who have continued to believe in him in the face of the encroaching collective disparagement. Since the centenary of his death in 1964, there has been growing rediscovery of his life and re-evaluation of his art. While the revival of his work is not universal, at least a slow but steady process of recovery and exploration has begun.The forty contributions chosen for this Reader follow a chronological course, from the days of Meyerbeer's international acclaim after the premieres of his first two French operas, through the critical discussion of his art that began to take place during the mid-years of the nineteenth century, to the growing hostility induced by the advent of Wagner and his ideological following. The line of enquiry then leads into the dark days after the First World War when critical hostility was at its peak, on to the more reflective mood emerging during the 1950s, to the period of reassessment heralded by the centenary of his death in 1964. Finally, it surveys the critical rediscovery that was initiated by the bicentenary of his birth in 1991, a process that is still developing apace.The Reader also presents a series of portraits of the composer, and some images from his operas, an icongraphical commentary running parallel to the texts.

Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable

Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable
Author: Robert Ignatius Letellier
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2014-03-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1443845515

Robert le Diable by Giacomo Meyerbeer is regarded as a musical milestone, a definitive statement in the 19th-century development of French grand opéra from the tragédie lyrique of Lully, Rameau, Gluck and Spontini. The libretto by Eugène Scribe and Germain Delavigne was derived from the medieval legend of “Robert the Devil”. First performed on 21 November 1831 at the Paris Opéra, the work brought Meyerbeer international celebrity. Robert le Diable remains a legend in the annals of opera. The fascinating story reveals a complex imagery and symbolism that touches on the deepest intuitions of human experience and personal development, and exercises an archetypal unconscious appeal akin to the nature of fairy tales. The musical language, richly melodic and theatrically powerful, looks back to Rossini and the traditions of bel canto, and yet forges a new formal pliancy and dramatic urgency. The harmony and orchestration, the melodramatic plot, and overwhelming stage effects (especially the famous act 3 Ballet of the Nuns, a touchstone of dark Romanticism) confirmed Meyerbeer as the leading opera composer of his age. His style fuses German counterpoint, Italian melody, French grandeur, and unprecedented orchestral riches in a unique and overwhelming artistic blend. Robert became one of the greatest successes in the history of opera. In the first two years of its history it was given in 69 different theatres, and was performed 754 times at the Paris Opéra until 1893. This huge success was reflected in more than 160 transcriptions, arrangements, paraphrases and fantasias for the orchestra, military band, dance band, piano and other solo instruments written between 1832 and 1955. After many years of neglect, there is a resurgence of interest in this work with its fascinating appeal. This book is devoted to the story of this exceptional opera. It traces the origins, the première, the performance history, and also considers the special characteristics of both the libretto and the music. One of the most intriguing aspects of Robert le Diable was the nature of the iconography generated by its most famous scenes. Artists and illustrators responded in many different ways to the Gambling Scene, the Scene at the Cross, the Cloister Scene for the legendary Ballet of the Nuns, and the great trio in act 5. All of these are examined in terms of the the many different pictorial and plastic responses they inspired over some 60 years.

Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850

Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850
Author: Christopher John Murray
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 664
Release: 2004
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781579584221

Review: "Written to stress the crosscurrent of ideas, this cultural encyclopedia provides clearly written and authoritative articles. Thoughts, themes, people, and nations that define the Romantic Era, as well as some frequently overlooked topics, receive their first encyclopedic treatments in 850 signed articles, with bibliographies and coverage of historical antecedents and lingering influences of romanticism. Even casual browsers will discover much to enjoy here."--"The Top 20 Reference Titles of the Year," American Libraries, May 2004.

The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer: The last years, 1857-1864

The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer: The last years, 1857-1864
Author: Giacomo Meyerbeer
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
Total Pages: 732
Release: 1999
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780838638453

Volume 4 is devoted to the last years (1857-64); while age and declining health saw a waning of the composer's personal optimism. It contains a series of glossaries listing his compositions and the musical and theatrical works he attended throughout his life, as well as a bibliography.